(Previously: Part 1 and Part 2)
These Takuroku writeups got a bit longer than intended and there’s still a few remaining releases I want to mention, the ones which are more or less just musicians playing. Of course it is never that simple. Neil Charles’ LOW and BEYOND is a set of nine tightly-packed studies for solo double bass, each one taking technique as a starting point for invention instead of a crutch. Restless but never hurried, each one demonstrates how craft is elevated to art. By way of comparison, Farida Amadou’s solos for electric bass on Reading eyes and facial expressions take the instrument itself as the subject material. The extended pair of works consist on the one hand of a sculptural essay in open string resonance, and on the other of varying methods of attack upon the strings, both by physical means and through electronic distortion.
Two sets of piano miniatures came out at the same time. Calum Storrie’s Nine Day Score is a set of graphic scores with no specific means of interpretation, played here by Steve Beresford on piano. Storrie’s scores employ a fixed set of elements, deployed in various ways across each two-page composition. Beresford’s realisations are very free, making no direct use of the musical quotations in each score; he transforms the collaged pieces into slow, widely-spaced intervals, a slender framework of notes set against the ambience of his room. It’s a home recording, on a slightly chiming upright piano, captured on a phone, albeit in stereo. The raw, blemished sound adds an immediacy that deflects any charges of preciousness in these keyboard meditations. Tom Scott’s Tattered Angels also run the risk of preciousness, being overtly pretty and delicate, but they are too modest to be guilty of affectation. His piano pieces are more fully voiced, but even briefer, averaging a little over two minutes each. They seem shorter as each one is a thumbnail sketch, stating a theme and elaborating on it a little before falling silent. On rare occasions, he dips into the lower half of the keyboard but otherwise keeps the instrument to a small, wistful voice. As you’re thinking how simple it is you start to notice the times he’s multitracked himself, as phrases echo and cascade softly. You can hear tape wobble and start to wonder how it was made.
I’ve been listening to Anton Lukoszevieze’s Word Origins for a few months, on and off. Well-known as a cellist, less so as a composer, it should be no surprise that his solo improvisations, recorded one per day, convey enough detail and substance for repeated listening. Technique is at the forefront, but at the service of presenting and articulating musical material; most of the pieces use changes in bowing position, attack and pressure to differentiate sound, rather than a reliance on pitch. Harmonics are common. Each piece may set a mood, but, with a few exceptions, there’s less interest in making each piece become a ‘meditation’ fixated on one gesture. After becoming more familiar with the more straightforward pieces that appear later in the set, the more mecurial works start to distinguish themselves in the ear.
[…] (Continued in Part 3) […]